Adrian Cox welcomes viewers to “the threshold of the real and the imagined, the physical world and the world of dreams.” The artist refers to the inhabitants of his work from the series Into the Spirit Garden as Border Creatures, “a group of hybrid beings that live in the verdant wilderness of the Borderlands.” In this image, the Spirit Gardener—depicted in rainbows on the central island—experiences a death and rebirth while their companions celebrate their transition. Cox’s mythology employs the nonhuman to represent the journey of existence. This piece was originally commissioned by the band Tool to be used as a tour date poster, and eventually became a centerpiece of Cox’s allegorical series.
